Now is the perfect time to not blow an opportunity. Steinberg should either buy Kontact at the NI fire sale or at least license the Kontact engine for inclusion in Halion. Many of my libraries are available for Halion, but not all of those are going to just convert. Some have gone out of business.
NI is no longer going to be of any help. I knew when the venture capitalist firm got a hold of NI that this dumpster fire was going to spin out of control, just like when STG bought out AVID.
Steinberg please … my Kontact libraries are massive (pun not intended). It would be so awesome if I could just load them up in Halion 8.0. Please do not let this opportunity slip away.
Native Instruments’ Kontakt is the industry standard, and there are significantly more third-party providers for Kontakt than for Halion. Furthermore, Kontakt libraries are protected and cannot easily be transferred to another platform.
Directly porting or converting protected Native Instruments Kontakt libraries to Steinberg’s HALion is subject to significant technical limitations. HALion (including HALion 7) can only import unencrypted .nki files from Kontakt versions 1.x through 4.1. Encrypted commercial libraries and formats utilizing modern Native scripting cannot be imported.
Thanks for this thought provoking comment. I have a huge investment in third party Kontact libraries that I never thought I would have to worry about. Now my stomach is in knots.
In 2009 I made selected Cubase over Pro-Tools and I am glad that I did. But it never occurred to me that my sample libraries would someday be at risk. I have a Halion 7.5 license but only 20 sample libraries. My Kontact libraries on in the several hundreds.
I considered the science projects but my operation has gotten a little too big for that. I want Steinberg to take the project on. If they could license the Kontact format so that Halion would play them as is that would be great. I would be locked into the brand forever. I think they kind of know I already am.
Technology wise, their team could do the trade study and figure out if adding the Kontact catalog to Halion would be worth what they would have to pay. I would like to know the answer. My costs are already sunk.
WOW!!! Thank you. Do you know if Halion has an open format that I can stuff this content into? If not, what tool would your recommend. I noticed that this tool also supports the UVI formats. I have a lot of that content too.
Do you think there is an open source project that can consolidate a multiplicity of sample libraries? My studio is moving over to models now. I just need to protect my sample libraries until I can do everything I want with models.
I want AAS, or Pianoteq, Audio Modeling, IK Multimedia, or anyone else for that matter to make good pedal steel, banjo, and mandolin models. None of those are comparable to sample libraries yet.
Kontakt will not stop working and InMusic will want to retain customers, so I wouldn’t worry about losing access to existing libraries just yet. Personally, I also wouldn’t be in a hurry to update to whatever version InMusic are pushing right now, let’s see what happens first.
I opted for HALion years ago because it has a free player that can play free content, whereas Native Instruments had a free player that could play only content licensed by NI.
Nevertheless, I still had to invest in Kontakt, simply because that’s where the content was, and everybody wanted/needed it. Yes, I have lots invested in Kontakt libraries, but I don’t care too much for the product, and haven’t created any Kontakt libraries in years. It was clear to me when I invested in Kontakt, that the ecosystem was proprietary and I have therefore worked on the basis that I would never be able to adequately convert to any other format.
To remove this dependency I print all tracks that use Kontakt prior to archiving.
Thanks for weighing in. I don’t think they are going to vaporize overnight either. They are just too big. But Pro-Tools has shown us you are never too big to go subscription.
There’s also Waves who lost a significant proportion of their custumer base when they went for a forced subscription model. After having evoked an epic sh*tstorm they took it back. The image damage is still noticeable up to this day. I don’t think NI would take that risk under the current circumstances.
I worked for a company that was bought out by venture capitalists. That was the day that anything other than money quit mattering.
I’m worried the only way it looks like AllMusic will get any real money is to extort money from us license holders. Somebody still has to enable my copy of Kontact every time I log in. :-/
I originally bought the Complete Bundle but Kontact is the only thing I ever used. Battery and Reaktor were a little interesting, but they were never at the top like Kontact. Massive has always been a dumpster fire. Losing Kontact is really going to hurt.
I’ve been watching the lamentation of the AVID customers. They lost ProTools and Sibelius. I thought maybe Steinberg/Yamaha might snatch a license deal or two in the shake-up.
I guess cross-grade love is all they are really going to do, but an actual migration path from Kontact would really help. I just tallied up my receipts over the years. Most of it is in third party Kontact libraries.
STEINBERG, I WILL BUY A KONTACT TO HALION CONVERSION $$$ … ON-THE_SPOT!!! I’LL BET I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE!!!
Actually I did this about a month ago when I realized I was several versions of Kontakt out of date. So far so good, and the GUI is much improved.
InMusic owns lots of different music brands including BFD. My copy of BFD3 broke awhile back and I suspected (correctly) it was related to an old email address that I had no current access to. I initially ignored it because I was really sick of dealing with problems from that address. But last week I contacted InMusic’s customer support and it was really top notch. They did use an AI front end, but it was really designed well. It quickly figured out that my problem was more complex than any of its canned responses, so it asked a few questions and told me it would submit a ticket to their help desk who got it sorted out after a couple of email exchanges.
I bring this up because a company that cares about its help desk usually cares about doing other stuff right. For comparison (US ISP) Earthlink forces you to communicate with their pretty useless AI via a text field that only shows about 20 characters. You can type in a lot more text than that, but you’ll only see the last little bit of it. They’ve clearly given their help process a lot of thought.
Just out of curiosity, how out of date were you? I’m on Kontakt 8 but still getting my head around the changed GUI, and yes, it has improved over the last to versions. The reason I ask is that I think I’d prefer to spend the time learning HALion more deeply, seeing as Kontakt is at something of a crossroads.
I’m not against InMusic having taken it over, in fact I wish them well, but one of the first changes they made was apparently to let a lot of NI staff go. Hence my “wait-and-see” before jumping on Komplete 2026, which I’m thinking won’t be much of an upgrade for me, and will surely be followed by Komplete 2027, 2028 etc., which starts sounding like getting milked by venture capitalists again.
I should update from Kontakt 7 to 8, I did install the 8 player version and can’t stand the interface…8 just looks like a browser, hopefully the full version has an interface with controls!
Ages ago I had a handful of Kontakt titles I wanted to buy, but it turned out to be cheaper to buy Komplete. While I dabbled with the other stuff mostly I only use Kontakt and mostly 3rd party libraries. So outside of Kontakt as a platform I don’t feel very invested in NI’s longevity. I assume the 3rd party folks would come up with an alternative if Kontakt disappeared. They own their own library encryption so they can convert to whatever platforms they want.
I’m kind of on the fence about Kontakt 8. I’ve got to wrap my mind around the new GUI. My last two projects that used it were on version 6. I am up to date on Komplete but it has turned out to be a really expensive way to get Kontakt for me.
To me it seemed like instead of “wait and see” but I thought if I put a bug in Steinberg’s ear they might look closer at it. They seem to always be asking what they can do to make things better.
To me Halion is to Kontakt as Dorico is to Sibelius right now. Halion might grow into the next Kontakt if it disappears but why not make it a moonshot? If they have the cash lying around or could finance it, AllMusic might sell.
The way I see it Halion may not be Kontakt, but NI is not Steinberg/Yamaha either. If anyone could do it, it would be them. Halion would become a monster overnight.
Not allegedly. They did. It’s like Moog all over again. Izotope got bought back by its original developer because he love his craft. InMusic just loves money. They sold off BrainWorx. Monetizing the heck out of Kontakt has got to be next. Somebody in the board room is pounding the table right now. Please Steinberg/Yamaha, make the call. At least talk to them.